Orlando Florida Patrolled By Surveillance Drones As Early As This Summer

APOctatron shows the camera aboard the SkySeer drone used for surveillance and reconnaissance for law enforcement (click to expand)

When Congress passed a bill last February allowing unmanned drones to fly American skies it became only a matter of time before UAVs patrolled U.S. cities for local law enforcement.

While most drones in the U.S. are flown along the Mexican border, the Orange County Sheriff's Office wants to put them over metro Orlando within the next few months. The Greater Orlando metropolitan area is home to more than 2 million residents and is Florida's third largest city.

Sheriff's spokesman Jeff Williamson ... would not say exactly how the drones would be used, he wrote in an email that they might be deployed when looking for explosives, barricaded suspects and to inspect "hostile/inaccessible terrain" or at train accidents.

As for civil-rights concerns, Williamson wrote, "The OCSO has the privacy of its citizenry as a foremost concern. The device will only be put into operations on the command of the high risk incident commander."

YouTubeThermal drone image of a house showing rafters in the roof and the heat lamps in the bathroom (click to expand)

The sheriff still needs the County Commission to sign off on the request before it goes to the FAA for approval. The federal agency should have no problem accommodating as it was ordered by Congress to get as many drones as possible into the air by November, and be able to handle 30,000 UAVs by 2020.

SkySeer™ is a lightweight, portable, autonomous-flight UAV designed for single-person operation. It weighs less than five pounds, flies quietly, can be assembled in minutes, and is hand-launched. It has a flight time of 70 minutes and is recoverable through a normal landing or parachute-based vertical landing (optional). GPS coordinates (latitude/longitude) can be programmed into the Ground Control Station so the SkySeer™ can fly to a specific point of interest. The flight path can also be set by pointing and clicking GPS waypoints on the ground controller, giving the operator full control over the UAV’s air-borne activities as well as the operation of its equipment, such as cameras. The video can be recorded to a DVD or Flash media at the ground station. The night version SkySeer™ includes a thermal camera that allows filming in total darkness. A stealth surveillance mission at night at 250’ has been demonstrated. The two-mile range of coverage can be extended using NetWeaver™. Training is required to fly a SkySeer™

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